The risks of Obama's defense cuts

Rowan Scarborough:

President Obama's first defense budget increases risks in future wars by scaling back weapon systems designed to dominate the battlefield and protect the homeland, say military experts.

The Pentagon was to activate 44 ground-based interceptors by 2011 in Alaska and California to protect the United States against a limited ballistic attack from North Korea and Iran. It broke down this way according to Missile Defense Agency budget submitted last year: 30 interceptors to stop a North Korean attack; 14 to blunt Iran.

But Obama's 2010 budget released in April deletes 14 interceptors. On its face, this means the country will have fewer ways to stop an attack by Iran as that country pursues both nuclear warheads and the missiles to carry them as far Israel, Europe and the United States.

"This administration has presumably found that the Iran threat is not credible, which I think stretches credulity," Baker Spring, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told HUMAN EVENTS.

Spring said he knows of no change in the U.S. missile threat assessment between President George W. Bush's last defense budget and Obama's first one.

In fact, recent events suggest the threat is greater.

North Korean has refused, despite more than a decade of wrenching negotiations with the Clinton and Bush administrations, to give up its nuclear weapons program. Intelligence agencies say it entered the decade with one or two nuclear warheads and probably has several more by now.

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There is much more.

It should be noted that Iran today announced a test of a new missile capable of reaching Israel. I am sure that is not the limits of their ambitions but just a way station on the way to having an ability to attack the US and Europe. The Democrats have always had a hostility to missile defense first saying it would not work and now saying it is not needed. We will have to see if diplomacy is an effective substitute.